Storing up on Tapes

There have been some talks about the demise of tapes, but the love

affair of Indian enterprises with tapes shows no signs of abating. Rather, it

looks that Indian CIOs are increasingly opting for tapes as their preferred

medium for near-line storage. The endorsement of tapes, as the backup media for

Indian enterprises, is confirmed by the recently released IDC Asia/Pacific

(excluding Japan) Branded Tape Drive 2004-2008 Semiannual Forecast Update.

The overall market for branded single tape drives in Asia/Pacific

(excluding Japan) is expected to increase to $222 mn by 2008, a CAGR of 1.3%

during 2003-08. At the first glance, this growth figure seems fairly low, but

it, in fact, reflects a decline in the entry-level segment of the tape drive

storage market, and a considerable price pressure in the midrange and enterprise

segments. In addition, despite continuing supremacy of tapes, the increasing

use of disk-based systems for backup and recovery is also another contributing

factor to this low growth figure.

The single tape drive storage systems market in Asia/Pacific (excluding

Japan) in the first half of 2004 was estimated at $114.4 mn, representing an 8%

y-o-y increase over H1 of 2003. Australia continued to lead the market with a

20.2% share by value of shipments; India trailed at 15.8% and China ranked

third, at 14.5%. This is an impressive endorsement of how Indian enterprises

are going for backup solutions, perhaps a reflection of how regulatory

compliances are driving the adoption of tapes across organizations.

style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;

color:black'>IDC expects low-end drives to retain the lion's share of the

single tape drive market in terms of total unit shipments in Asia/Pacific

(excluding Japan) in the next four years. As the majority of companies in the

region are SMBs, and given their limited budgets and amount of data usage, the

uptake of low-end drives by these businesses is expected to constitute a large

percentage of this market. Further kudos to the Indian enterprises comes from

Jack Yu, Market Analyst, Storage Research at IDC Asia/Pacific: "The

emerging nations will produce strong growth in the single tape drive market in

the next five years as companies seek increased efficiencies from

computers," he says. "Demand for tape-based solutions will rise as

the notion of data protection and recovery takes hold and companies see more

need to archive their valuable data."

India is forecast to overtake Australia, which is a mature market

registering relatively flat growth, to ship $45 mn of single tape drives in

2008. Australia, by comparison, is expected to see $42.5 mn worth of sales,

while in China the forecast is $31.8 mn.

Disks too



Indian enterprises are marching ahead even in disk adoption.

This evidence is clearly brought to light by the recently published IDC's

Asia/Pacific Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker. While China, Australia and

Korea remained the largest markets for external disk storage systems in the

Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan region), the highest growth rates were recorded

by India, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, and Malaysia in 2004.

The external disk storage customer revenue in the region grew by

8.5% in 2004 to reach $1,570.6 mn from $1,448.1 mn recorded in the previous

year. The total market for disk storage systems increased by 3.6% to $2,078.1

mn, up from $2,006.2 mn in 2003. External storage accounted for 75.6% of revenue

in 2004 compared with 72.2% in the previous year.

External storage capacity showed strong growth in 2004 in Asia

Pacific (excluding Japan), up by 65.1% to reach 76,350 TBs in 2004 from 46,239

TBs recorded in 2003. The results indicate that the ongoing demand for storage

capacity remains strong for all countries throughout the Asia/Pacific region as

many organizations build their disk storage systems to store and manage

ever-increasing amounts of business and reference data. With India expecting to

record the highest growth rate in the next few years, these observations are

particularly true for Indian enterprises. While regulatory compliances are

driving the thriving tape market, disks are increasingly being adopted by

telcos and banks. With offshore outsourcing looking set to remain an

overwhelming trend, BPOs are emerging as substantial users of disk-based

storage.

Demand for additional capacity is gaining momentum in 2005.

Organizations are increasingly networking their storage resources to expand

capacity and add flexibility to their existing storage installations. Networked

storage is the foundation for today's business operations for its scalability

and flexibility benefits. IDC's latest data corroborates this fact: While

external disk storage systems connected to servers via a SAN accounted for

53.2% of disk storage systems revenue in 2004, DAS and NAS accounted for 40.5%

and 6.3% respectively.

Source: Dataquest